Nikon Z7II and 24-120 f/4 lens: Sorry, I was wrong.
June 1st, 2022
I was wrong in my earlier post about diffraction causing unsharp results with the 24-120 lens. The test I did was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was shooting indoors with limited light. I, of course, needed to change something to keep the exposures consistent as I ran the apertures from f/4 to f/22. I was afraid if I reduced the shutter speed it might introduce unsharpness caused by camera shake. So I elected to allow the ISO (set on auto) to run up to keep the exposures the same. This was a mistake. The Z7II has, to my eye, spectacular performance at high ISOs. But in this case there was enough noise to make the f/16 and f/22 exposures appear to be soft.
So, I did another test. I took a magazine outside and ran through the apertures changing the shutter speed to maintain exposure and holding the ISO at 400. You can see the f/4 shot above and the f22 shot below.
Here’s a closer look:
To my eye there isn’t a significant difference between f/4 and f/22. The remarkable thing about that is that this lens seems to maintain pretty much the same level of sharpness at every aperture, including the largest aperture, f/4. I find that pretty amazing. I hope you can see that in these jpegs, despite the compression. They will enlarge a bit if you click on them.
By the way, that magazine spread from Rider Magazine is from a story my best friend, Ken Frick, wrote about our many years of traveling the country together on our motorcycles. He wrote about and photographed our trips through all those years for various motorcycle magazines. I was often the model, so I ended up in a lot of magazines, including a cover or two. Check out Ken’s website for a bunch of very fine photographs, including many things in addition to motorcycle photos.
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